in Melbourne, but commuting back and forth to Virginia. I am one of those writers who tries to get as much information as possible. So I walked all the places depicted in the novel. I was there. But people kept laughing and chuckling and saying, “You’re living in Australia and you’re writing a novel about the American Civil War,” and I noticed that in the reviews, especially the ones in Australia, there was much talk about the idea of distance and perspective. I suppose I am obsessed with my own culture. I think that being out of one’s culture changes the way you see everything.
I did an article for the SFWA Bulletin called “Double Vision.” I see things as an American, enmeshed in my culture, basically, as a New Yorker, but I also see things now from an expatriate perspective, and everything looks different because of that distance. When you travel as a tourist, you take your own atmosphere with you. It’s different when you find yourself living in a place. After I was living in Australia for about eight months, I realized that Australian culture and American culture look very similar, but are really profoundly different. Even the language is different. So, although I’m here [in the USA] and I am comfortable and this is my culture, I feel like an outsider because I can never stop seeing with this double vision. I’m comfortable everywhere, but always an outsider. So I think it has given me this strange kind of perspective, and I am very interested in trying to figure out my home culture.
Q: I am sure a lot of writers have done that—
Dann: Of course, Hemingway living in Paris—
Q: With any number of expatriate Russians.
Dann: But I didn’t do it for that. I met Janeen, and I never believed in this, but it was basically love at first sight. And three months later the Hermit of Binghamton was living in the center of Melbourne and trying to navigate the infrastructure. I would try to dial “operator” on the telephone. I would dial zero and nothing would happen. I would get into a car to drive and then I would have to remember that the steering wheel was on the other side. In other words, I wasn’t saying, “I’m going to go and immerse myself in another culture to have stuff to write about.” I found myself there, and then all that stuff started happening. So it was all unplanned.
Q: Most writers lives are, I suspect, unplanned. Real deliberation doesn’t work.
Dann: For me, life and writing are like gambling. You can feel when you’re on a roll. Salesmen know about this. You can knock on doors and keep knocking on doors and nothing happens, and then suddenly you get on a roll and you could sell ice to Eskimos. So I’ve been on a roll. Every once in a while it stops, and nothing you do will work. You just keep walking and walking until something else happens. So I guess in a way I am not a tremendous planner.
Q: Are you ready to write about Australia?
Dann: I’m getting ready. I think there can be a rather long period of gestation between experiencing traumatic, life-changing experiences and writing about them. I wrote a story called “Jubilee,” which was one of the first on-line stories. That was when Omni was testing the, er, aether with Neon Visions. That story is in my new collection called...Jubilee. Part of that story takes place in the States and in Greece, because I had been in Greece just before I wrote it, and part takes place in Melbourne. I think I am beginning to see the Australian culture now and what aspects I’m interested in writing about. So it may happen in the next couple of years.
Q: Getting back to science fiction, wouldn’t this kind of perspective better equip you to write about another planet?
Dann: [Laughs.] When I was working on The Memory Cathedral, the idea came to me of history being a different place, a dislocation....I was on a number of panels here [at the World Fantasy Con in Corpus Christi] and I was listening to a number of people asking questions about myth and about how stories worked in the past, and we were all assuming that the mindset in the past was the same as the mindset now. I feel that people in the Renaissance had a completely different mindset, a different sensorium. They perceived things differently.
Most novels about space-travel don’t talk about the tremendous, hollow alienation that is a consequence of being away from everything familiar. You feel this distance toward everything. When I moved to Australia, when I started living in a different culture, even though it’s an English-speaking culture, I viscerally felt that dislocation. So, yes, I expect I’ll try to write about that in the future. I want to write about never being able to go home again in ways that maybe haven’t been done a lot in the genre. Fool that I am, I suppose I want to write the great American novel. [Laughs.]
Q: You could take your experiences and then make up another planet, and deal with the sense of dislocation far more convincingly than could a writer who has never been out of New Jersey.
Dann: Being a science fiction writer gave me a leg up when I tried to write about the past. It was a question of extrapolating backwards! The alieness of the past fascinates me, and I tried to recreate that alien world called the Renaissance in The Memory Cathedral, just as I tried to recreate another alien world, that of the American Civil War with The Silent.
But, to answer your question, which I keep dancing around, yes, it would be interesting to write about science fictional alien cultures as I did with, say, a novel like Starhiker, but with my own experience behind it.
Q: I would also imagine, by way of perspective, that your view on science fiction now is very different from what it was when you started out. Surely you are now writing things which you would never have imagined yourself writing, back at the beginning of your career in the early ’70s.
Dann: I have become a completely different writer, but part of that is just growing as a writer and, dare I say it, as a person.
When I was flying over here, we stopped in Sydney, because I had to give a lecture about Leonardo da Vinci at the Powerhouse Museum—they had the Gates Codex on exhibition. Later on, I bumped into a friend at the Sydney airport whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. She used to have a bookstore in my hometown, and she was visiting Australia. She had known me from the time I was fifteen and was one of the people who had guided me toward books and educated me. To paraphrase what Gene Wolfe once said about Damon Knight, she grew me from a bean. So there I was chatting about my career and talking about Hong Kong being one of my favorite places, and how I wouldn’t be making it back this year...blah-blah-blah.... And she said, “Listen to yourself. Did you ever think way back then that you would be living as you’re living now?”
No, I could never have called it....
One of the things that I think has happened since I have been in Australia, which I am proud of, is the effect that Dreaming Down-Under, the anthology I edited with Janeen Webb, has had on genre publishing in Australia. When Harlan Ellison visited Sydney a few years ago for a conference, he said, “You know, you guys are having your golden age right now.” He’d touched a nerve. There was a real zeitgeist going on. Writers were starting to talk to one another, and there was a lot of excitement. Our Dreaming anthology became a sort of focus, a showcase for that excitement.
It has been wonderful to see these writers starting to publish in the United States and in Europe. I acted as a facilitator for a lot of people in the early days. They didn’t have a sense of how American publishing worked, so I was acting as a de facto agent. It was a real kick because I could see the effect on the industry, and it was lovely, positive stuff.
Q: Are you going to do another Dreaming Down-Under?
Dann: I wasn’t going to do another anthology like Dreaming unless something really big came along. People kept asking, “Why don’t you do another volume?” I kept saying, “No, another volume in maybe five years.” But Dreaming was like Dangerous Visions. It had that same effect in Australia. Janeen and I wanted to wait until new
